Some of you may have seen an article floating around recently on a website. This article is a critique of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I in turn wish to attempt a response to said article. You’ve been warned this article will probably spoil more of it than the previous. I am also going to spoil a plot point of The Wind Waker. You’ve been warned.

There are probably at least three times as many warnings in the New Testament about the way we speak of others as there are about sexual sin. Just an estimate.

I’m not 100% certain about this, but the pelvic issues appear to be more popular, or at least more popularly debated. Even a good few hours of Catholic Answers probably wouldn’t turn up a real debate about how much malignant gossip is okay, presumably because we agree that the answer is “none.”

Many people are aware of the copyleft movement for media, software and documentation, including things like open-source and creative commons licenses. The general thrust is to keep the work free from being copyrighted by any one entity. To that end, these licenses usually include a stipulation that the work is free to be modified or adapted only into works with similar licenses to the first. However, these licenses don’t have to exclude commercial uses or sale of the product, even if this might be the practical outcome.

What if we created a sort of Catholic “creative commons” licensed learning material for homeschooling parents and schools that didn’t actually cost anything in terms of licensing and was designed, from the start, to be owned by all the faithful?

I went to a park near my house one day to finish reading an essay called “Imagination and Community,” from Marilynne Robinson’s excellent When I Was a Child I Read Books.

To give an idea of the amount of trees in this park, it is a small forest. It was likely to be a bit cold in the shade, so I took a light jacket. I found a playground and tried to settle on a swing. This was a little uncomfortable, so I sat in the sawdust and leaned against the ladder of some monkey bars.

I took my usual route to work this morning, and one of my usual streets had a fair amount of construction going on. It was enough that two opposing lanes had to funnel through one lane, and workers had to hold those stop/slow signs we all know.

I found myself stopped at the front of my line, waiting for the signal to move.

One of the oncoming vehicles that had to get through was a recycling truck. This wasn’t exactly great news, but you can’t do much except roll with it.

And at some point in time–I couldn’t say when, exactly–the Foo Fighters’ “Learning to Fly” had begun playing on the radio.

Mercifully, I only saw the truck pick up two or three bins before the cars on the other side had cleared enough that I could move.